Birthright: Chimaeron

Since when do units in the province not defend against raids??

If there are units in the targeted province they get to defend I mean hell look at Watchtower:

Watch Tower
Cost: 10 GB
Benefit: Acts a virtual scout in the province in question; may move up to Province_Level (of province with the watch tower) units from 1 adjacent province in response to a raid action. Watch Tower also negates first strike from Raider Units.

That allows you to bring defenders from an adjacent province rather than the units IN the actual province so it would seem only sane that the units already IN the province can defend.

Ugh, tying it to taxation doesn't make any sense. It's like the raiders are just shutting their eyes and refusing to look at anything that belongs to other domains already, and going straight for the populace. 'I found some good silverware!' 'No, put that back, it belongs to the temple. Let's take these wooden spoons.'

Yes, they defend against raids, but not with a battle! They influence the DC. You're confusing 'defend against' with 'get attacked by'. The defenders don't have to be defeated, just avoided.

You can't use the starting turn as the baseline for what is/is not in a province 1 regularly. It could just as easily have been 0 GBs or 20 GBs, or anything between depending on how quickly Juan wanted us to get going.

Less cash at start means a slower early build and struggles for players with potentially 1/3 to 1/2 falling out due to bad rolls and just crappy luck. More cash means everyone gets going with most everyone becoming semi-successful early on (barring crazy actions on their part or their neighbors).

And a raid is grabbing the same crap the lord of the province is taking in taxation. What do you think they are grabbing that is not bolted down?

Ugh just looked at raid rules. What a complicated time consuming formula just to give the realism that raiders are hard to nail down and stop.... I say get rid of it. The only places in a province that would have anything close to a GB would be the areas where the army is if there are any units in the province. That whole abomination of a formula should never have been birthed....

And can spread the normal taxation +1 roll among the holdings. Or roll randomly as to who got hit.

I'm not using it as a baseline. It's to demonstrate that a realm's wealth is in that realm's provinces. If a hypothetical realm had as many GB as people in it, then yes, even its level 1 provinces will have their roads metaphorically paved with gold. GB in a treasury represents the resources a regent has available to use. Those can be taken, by one means or another. The raid is not taking gold from the people of a province, that would be taxation. It's taking valuable resources from the domains that are present there, including by ransom, with some collateral damage.

We had these rules throughout the last game and they were never used, because by the time we'd explored possible targets, raiding and theft had become too politically dangerous, and the opportunity cost for actions was too high. And we're still talking about cutting them down? We might as well cut them out at that rate. Which is strange, because a large part of the reason we came up with this new setting idea was to encourage the use of raids.

It's false logic to say you have 10 GBs now at game start in a crap province, therefore later when you have more provinces I can still get 10 GBs out of your crap province.

We didn't use them because it was much more lucrative to do a Merc campaign or random adventure.